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Getting Started with glyph

Source: vignettes/getting-started.Rmd
getting-started.Rmd
library(glyph)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'glyph'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     scale

This vignette walks through glyph’s core grammar with live, interactive output. Every plot below is a real glyph_spec built with the package and rendered to an actual D3-backed htmlwidget — not a screenshot.

One thing worth knowing up front: printing a glyph_spec at the console auto-renders it (like a ggplot2 plot), but that auto-render only fires in an interactive R session. Inside a vignette or pkgdown article the code runs non-interactively, so each example below ends the pipeline with an explicit render() call to produce the widget.

1. A basic scatterplot

No aes(), no factor() coercion — aesthetic mappings are just bare column names passed straight to glyph() and mark_point().

glyph(mtcars, x = wt, y = mpg) |>
  mark_point(color = cyl) |>
  render()

2. Tooltips and hover, declared in the pipeline

Interactivity is grammar, not glue. interact() turns on tooltips and a hover effect right where the plot is built, and titles() adds a title in the same pipe — no ggplotly() conversion step, no lost formatting.

glyph(mtcars, x = wt, y = mpg) |>
  mark_point(color = cyl) |>
  interact(tooltip = TRUE, hover = "enlarge") |>
  titles(title = "Motor Trend Cars") |>
  render()

Hover over a point to see it enlarge; hover longer to see the tooltip.

3. Animated bar chart

animate() declares a transition as part of the spec. stagger offsets each bar’s entrance animation so they draw in sequence rather than all at once.

glyph(mtcars, x = cyl, y = mpg) |>
  mark_bar() |>
  animate(transition = "slide", stagger = 50) |>
  render()

Reload this page (or re-run the chunk in an R session) to see the bars slide in.

4. Token-based dark theme

Instead of ggplot2’s dozens of individual theme() arguments, theme_tokens() takes a small preset (or individual tokens like bg, font, accent) and cascades foreground, grid, and title colors automatically for contrast.

glyph(mtcars, x = wt, y = mpg) |>
  mark_point(color = cyl) |>
  interact(tooltip = TRUE) |>
  theme_tokens(preset = "dark") |>
  titles(title = "Dark Theme Example") |>
  render()

5. Composed multi-plot layout

compose() arranges multiple glyph_spec objects into a single layout — here, two scatterplots side by side — without reaching for patchwork or cowplot. Composed layouts are rendered the same way as a single spec: pass the layout to render().

p1 <- glyph(mtcars, x = wt, y = mpg) |> mark_point(color = cyl)
p2 <- glyph(mtcars, x = hp, y = mpg) |> mark_point(color = cyl)

compose(p1, p2, type = "hstack") |>
  render()

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